by H. G. Wells
only future generations may hope to examine…
Section 4
The state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which
swarmed and perished so abundantly over the country-side during
the dark days of the autumnal months that followed the Last War,
was one of blank despair. Barnet gives sketch after sketch of
groups of these people, camped among the vineyards of Champagne,
as he saw them during his period of service with the army of
pacification.
There was, for example, that 'man-milliner' who came out from a
field beside the road that rises up eastward out of Epernay, and
asked how things were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a
round-faced man, dressed very neatly in black-so neatly that it
was amazing to discover he was living close at hand in a tent
made of carpets-and he had 'an urbane but insistent manner,' a
carefully trimmed moustache and beard, expressive eyebrows, and
hair very neatly brushed.
'No one goes into Paris,' said Barnet.
'But, Monsieur, that is very unenterprising,' the man by the
wayside submitted.
'The danger is too great. The radiations eat into people's
skins.'
The eyebrows protested. 'But is nothing to be done?'
'Nothing can be done.'
'But, Monsieur, it is extraordinarily inconvenient, this living
in exile and waiting. My wife and my little boy suffer
extremely. There is a lack of amenity. And the season advances.
I say nothing of the expense and difficulty in obtaining
provisions… When does Monsieur think that something will be
done to render Paris-possible?'
Barnet considered his interlocutor.
'I'm told,' said Barnet, 'that Paris is not likely to be possible
again for several generations.'
'Oh! but this is preposterous! Consider, Monsieur! What are
people like ourselves to do in the meanwhile? Iam a costumier.
All my connections and interests, above all my style, demand
Paris…'
Barnet considered the sky, from which a light rain was beginning
to fall, the wide fields about them from which the harvest had
been taken, the trimmed poplars by the wayside.
'Naturally,' he agreed, 'you want to go to Paris. But Paris is
over.'
'Over!'
'Finished.'
'But then, Monsieur-what is to become-of ME?'
Barnet turned his face westward, whither the white road led.
'Where else, for example, may I hope to find-opportunity?'
Barnet made no reply.
'Perhaps on the Riviera. Or at some such place as Homburg. Or
some plague perhaps.'
'All that,' said Barnet, accepting for the first time facts that
had lain evident in his mind for weeks; 'all that must be over,
too.'
There was a pause. Then the voice beside him broke out. 'But,
Monsieur, it is impossible! It leaves-nothing.'
'No. Not very much.'
'One cannot suddenly begin to grow potatoes!'
'It would be good if Monsieur could bring himself--'
'To the life of a peasant! And my wife--You do not know the
distinguished delicacy of my wife, a refined helplessness, a
peculiar dependent charm. Like some slender tropical
creeper-with great white flowers… But all this is foolish
talk. It is impossible that Paris, which has survived so many
misfortunes, should not presently revive.'
'I do not think it will ever revive. Paris is finished. London,
too, Iam told-Berlin. All the great capitals were
stricken…'
'But--! Monsieur must permit me to differ.'
'It is so.'
'It is impossible. Civilisations do not end in this manner.
Mankind will insist.'
'On Paris?'
'On Paris.'
'Monsieur, you might as well hope to go down the Maelstrom and
resume business there.'
'I am content, Monsieur, with my own faith.'
'The winter comes on. Would not Monsieur be wiser to seek a
house?'
'Farther from Paris? No, Monsieur. But it is not possible,
Monsieur, what you say, and you are under a tremendous
mistake… Indeed you are in error… I asked merely for
information…'
'When last I saw him,' said Barnet, 'he was standing under the
signpost at the crest of the hill, gazing wistfully, yet it
seemed to me a little doubtfully, now towards Paris, and
altogether heedless of a drizzling rain that was wetting him
through and through…'
Section 5
This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly
apprehended deepens as Barnet's record passes on to tell of the
approach of winter. It was too much for the great mass of those
unwilling and incompetent nomads to realise that an age had
ended, that the old help and guidance existed no longer, that
times would not mend again, however patiently they held out. They
were still in many cases looking to Paris when the first
snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The
story grows grimmer…
If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet's return to
England, it is, if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of
fear-embittered householders, hiding food, crushing out robbery,
driving the starving wanderers from every faltering place upon
the roads lest they should die inconveniently and reproachfully
on the doorsteps of those who had failed to urge them onward…
The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March,
after urgent representations from the provisional government at
Orleans that they could be supported no longer. They seem to have
been a fairly well-behaved, but highly parasitic force
throughout, though Barnet is clearly of opinion that they did
much to suppress sporadic brigandage and maintain social order.
He came home to a famine-stricken country, and his picture of the
England of that spring is one of miserable patience and desperate
expedients. The country was suffering much more than France,
because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which it had
hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and
boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid
off. On the way thither they saw four men hanging from the
telegraph posts by the roadside, who had been hung for stealing
swedes. The labour refuges of Kent, he discovered, were feeding
their crowds of casual wanderers on bread into which clay and
sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was a shortage of even
such fare as that. He himself struck across country to
Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district round
London, and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one
of the wireless assistants at the central station and given
regular rations. The station stood in a commanding position on
the chalk hill that overlooks the town from the east…
Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless
cipher messages that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and
there it was that the Brissago proclamation of the end
of the war
and the establishment of a world government came under his hands.
He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise
what it was he was transcribing. He did it mechanically, as a
part of his tedious duty.
Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the
declaration that strained him very much, and in the evening when
he was relieved, he ate his scanty supper and then went out upon
the little balcony before the station, to smoke and rest his
brains after this sudden and as yet inexplicable press of duty.
It was a very beautiful, still evening. He fell talking to a
fellow operator, and for the first time, he declares, 'I began to
understand what it was all about. I began to see just what
enormous issues had been under my hands for the past four hours.
But I became incredulous after my first stimulation. "This is
some sort of Bunkum," I said very sagely.
'My colleague was more hopeful. "It means an end to
bomb-throwing and destruction," he said. "It means that
presently corn will come from America."
' "Who is going to send corn when there is no more value in
money?" I asked.
'Suddenly we were startled by a clashing from the town below. The
cathedral bells, which had been silent ever since I had come into
the district, were beginning, with a sort of rheumatic
difficulty, to ring. Presently they warmed a little to the work,
and we realised what was going on. They were ringing a peal. We
listened with an unbelieving astonishment and looking into each
other's yellow faces.
' "They mean it," said my colleague.
' "But what can they do now?" I asked. "Everything is broken
down…" '
And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry, Barnet
abruptly ends his story.
Section 6
From the first the new government handled affairs with a certain
greatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should
act greatly. From the first they had to see the round globe as
one problem; it was impossible any longer to deal with it piece
by piece. They had to secure it universally from any fresh
outbreak of atomic destruction, and they had to ensure a
permanent and universal pacification. On this capacity to grasp
and wield the whole round globe their existence depended. There
was no scope for any further performance.
So soon as the seizure of the existing supplies of atomic
ammunition and the apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was
assured, the disbanding or social utilisation of the various
masses of troops still under arms had to be arranged, the
salvation of the year's harvests, and the feeding, housing, and
employment of the drifting millions of homeless people. In
Canada, in South America, and Asiatic Russia there were vast
accumulations of provision that was immovable only because of the
breakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be
brought into the famine districts very speedily if entire
depopulation was to be avoided, and their transportation and the
revival of communications generally absorbed a certain proportion
of the soldiery and more able unemployed. The task of housing
assumed gigantic dimensions, and from building camps the housing
committee of the council speedily passed to constructions of a
more permanent type. They found far less friction than might have
been expected in turning the loose population on their hands to
these things. People were extraordinarily tamed by that year of
suffering and death; they were disillusioned of their traditions,
bereft of once obstinate prejudices; they felt foreign in a
strange world, and ready to follow any confident leadership. The
orders of the new government came with the best of all
credentials, rations. The people everywhere were as easy to
control, one of the old labour experts who had survived until the
new time witnesses, 'as gangs of emigrant workers in a new land.'
And now it was that the social possibilities of the atomic energy
began to appear. The new machinery that had come into existence
before the last wars increased and multiplied, and the council
found itself not only with millions of hands at its disposal but
with power and apparatus that made its first conceptions of the
work it had to do seem pitifully timid. The camps that were
planned in iron and deal were built in stone and brass; the roads
that were to have been mere iron tracks became spacious ways that
insisted upon architecture; the cultivations of foodstuffs that
were to have supplied emergency rations, were presently, with
synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, and scientific
direction, in excess of every human need.
The government had begun with the idea of temporarily
reconstituting the social and economic system that had prevailed
before the first coming of the atomic engine, because it was to
this system that the ideas and habits of the great mass of the
world's dispossessed population was adapted. Subsequent
rearrangement it had hoped to leave to its successors-whoever
they might be. But this, it became more and more manifest, was
absolutely impossible. As well might the council have proposed a
revival of slavery. The capitalist system had already been
smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy;
it fell to pieces at the first endeavour to stand it up again.
Already before the war half of the industrial class had been out
of work, the attempt to put them back into wages employment on
the old lines was futile from the outset-the absolute shattering
of the currency system alone would have been sufficient to
prevent that, and it was necessary therefore to take over the
housing, feeding, and clothing of this worldwide multitude
without exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little while
the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people
everywhere became an evident social danger, and the government
was obliged to resort to such devices as simple decorative work
in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles,
fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand
scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying
wages to the younger adults for attendance at schools that would
equip them to use the new atomic machinery… So quite
insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation of
urban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social
system.
Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financial
considerations have a sweeping way with them, and before a year
was out the records of the council show clearly that it was
rising to its enormous opportunity, and partly through its own
direct control and partly through a series of specific
committees, it was planning a new common social order for the
entire population of the earth. 'There can be no real social
stability or any general human happiness while
large areas of the
world and large classes of people are in a phase of civilisation
different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have
great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally
accepted social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the
rest.' So the council expressed its conception of the problem it
had to solve. The peasant, the field-worker, and all barbaric
cultivators were at an 'economic disadvantage' to the more mobile
and educated classes, and the logic of the situation compelled
the council to take up systematically the supersession of this
stratum by a more efficient organisation of production. It
developed a scheme for the progressive establishment throughout
the world of the 'modern system' in agriculture, a system that
should give the full advantages of a civilised life to every
agricultural worker, and this replacement has been going on right
up to the present day. The central idea of the modern system is
the substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual
cultivator, and for cottage and village life altogether. These
guilds are associations of men and women who take over areas of
arable or pasture land, and make themselvesresponsible for a
certain average produce. They are bodies small enough as a rule
to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and large enough to
supply all the labour, except for a certain assistance from
townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. They
have watchers' bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but
the ease and the costlessness of modern locomotion enables them
to maintain a group of residences in the nearest town with a
common dining-room and club house, and usually also a guild house
in the national or provincial capital. Already this system has
abolished a distinctively 'rustic' population throughout vast
areas of the old world, where it has prevailed immemorially. That
shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel, the narrow scandals
and petty spites and persecutions of the small village, that
hoarding, half inanimate existence away from books, thought, or
social participation and in constant contact with cattle, pigs,
poultry, and their excrement, is passing away out of human
experience. In a little while it will be gone altogether. In the
nineteenth century it had already ceased to be a necessary human
state, and only the absence of any collective intelligence and an
